Sandringham Private Game Reserve and the Sixteen: The Making of Africa’s Next Master Trackers

At Sandringham Private Game Reserve, the newest property in the Sabi Sabi Collection, a new generation of trackers is learning one of Africa’s oldest skills. The programme is building careers and strengthening rhino protection. It is also slowly changing how wildlife responds to the people who walk among it.

The Pride That Stopped Running

The Black Dam Pride once had little patience for company. Footsteps or an engine nearby were usually enough to send the lions out of sight. Today they lie in the open and listen to the safari vehicle as it rolls in, apparently untroubled by it.

It is a small scene, but in conservation it means a great deal. Wildlife that feels secure behaves naturally, settles into its territory and can be monitored and protected far more effectively. At Sandringham, much of that change is credited to Tracker Academy, whose students now train on the reserve.

Tracking Animals That Had Never Been Followed

For Innocent, who has been part of Sandringham’s wildlife rehabilitation efforts from the outset, the work has been exciting and demanding in equal measure. The animals had never been tracked on foot, and the early days were unnerving.

“The animals were skittish. Buffalos would run away. Lions would tuck in their tails and escape from view. But after three years of being here, we’ve seen a big change in the animals’ behaviour: how they react to us on foot and how they react to the vehicle.”

The aim, as he describes it, is for the animals to settle and to learn that the people moving through their landscape are there to protect them, not to harm them. Teaching that takes years of patient, consistent presence, and the tracker is at the centre of it.

A Classroom Measured in Spoor

Tracker Academy’s two current groups at Sandringham are made up of eight rhino guardians and eight lodge trackers. Both groups complete six months of training on the reserve before they move on to practical fieldwork.

The structure is deliberate. Classroom learning gives students the method, and time in the field tests it against real tracks, real weather and real animals. Students learn to read the ground and then to rely on that reading where it counts.

The programme now reaches beyond Sandringham. A presence has recently been established at Skukuza, where trackers from Kruger National Park are receiving refresher training in human tracking. That skill matters more and more in a region where protecting rhino means understanding the movements of people as well as animals

Where the Training Leads

The programme is judged by the jobs it leads to, and here the results are already visible. Five Tracker Academy graduates now work at Sandringham Private Game Reserve. Three of them are women from last year’s group of eight female tracker students.

That matters in an industry where tracking has long been seen as a male domain. These skills can open doors at game reserves across South Africa and further afield, so each graduate leaves with a qualification that carries well beyond one reserve’s boundaries.

An Invitation Into the Field

Sandringham also gives the programme’s supporters a rare chance to see the work up close. The reserve offers a special accommodation rate to Tracker Academy donors and sponsors who want to visit and see the camp.

Visitors can join the students in the bush alongside their trainer, watching how tracking skills are taught and then put into practice. It is a different kind of safari, one that is less about the sighting and more about the knowledge that makes the sighting possible.

A Family Legacy in the Greater Kruger

The initiative sits naturally within the Sabi Sabi Collection, a family owned portfolio of luxury lodges and boutique properties. For more than 45 years, Sabi Sabi has been a pioneer of sustainable safari tourism in the Greater Kruger. The Collection has expanded with The Claremont Boutique Hotel in Cape Town and Sandringham Private Game Reserve, but its founding principles remain conservation, community and connection.

Tracker Academy at Sandringham puts all three to work. The conservation is the protection of rhino and the rehabilitation of a reserve’s wildlife. The community is the careers built from a skill that has been part of this landscape for generations. The connection shows in a pride of lions that has learnt it no longer needs to run.

The Value of Being Trusted

Luxury travel in Africa has long been sold on proximity, on how close a guest can get to the animals. Sandringham offers something more lasting: wildlife that has learnt to trust, and trackers who have earned that trust one footprint at a time. Both rest on patience and on knowledge passed from one person to the next, and that may be the most valuable thing a reserve can offer.